Early returns are in, and NBA's new and colorful in-season tournament is merely meh

The NBA has brought us its new in-season tournament in the same manner as the annoying neighborhood kid who is constantly knocking on your door trying to sell you something you don’t really want. One day it’s lemonade, the next it’s cookies until finally you just get tired of saying no and end up with a pantry full of popcorn that you’re never going to eat. 

In that same spirit, I took in as much of the technicolor explosion as my retinas could handle Friday night, trying to set aside my long-held skepticism for Adam Silver’s big idea to inject some European soccer into American basketball and watch with an open mind. 

The conclusion: eh. 

It’s fine. It really is. The basketball was pretty good, but the NBA is often good. The garish floors got me hyped to go play Laser Tag for the first time in decades. The players seemed to compete with a skosh more intensity than your standard Friday night, though it’s hard to know whether that’s real or confirmation bias based on how relentlessly the NBA has marketed this thing. 

But the ultimate question about this experiment remains unanswered: Does anyone really care?

The people running the NBA aren’t dumb. They know this is going to be a slow burn and that it’s going to take years just for the concept of an in-season tournament to be ingrained in the minds of fans and players as something to take seriously. And they also know that the value of the regular season has been diminished to a certain extent by Ringzzzzz Culture, by load management and by the stiff competition for eyeballs in an environment where we get our preferred entertainment on-demand. 

So it’s worth a try. In the end, though, somebody’s got to buy this as a serious competition apart from the normal NBA season. We won’t really know what that looks like until the final four teams get to Las Vegas on Dec. 7.

For now, it’s all brand new, which can be interesting and exciting on its own for a little while. But its long-term success is really going to be up to the teams to signal to the fans that this is more than the same regular-season basketball in different wrapping paper. 

You can’t do that by telling people they should care or slapping bright colors on hardwood or putting Michael Imperioli in commercials. You can only make it happen with dramatic on-court moments that live in the highlight reel of the mind like Michael Jordan’s switch-hands layup or LeBron James’ chasedown block of Andre Igoudala or Ray Allen’s three in the corner when the champagne was being wheeled out for the Spurs.

Can you deliver that in November and December? We’ll see. 

There were two immediate issues with the tournament that came to mind watching the games on Friday. 

The first is that it’s probably too early to flip that switch of taking the basketball super seriously. For all of these teams, it was their fifth or sixth game of the season. Most teams are still in the phase of figuring out their rotations, their best combinations and shaking off some rust. Simply from a competitive intrigue standpoint, an in-season tournament might function better around the 20-game mark when teams kind of start to know who they are and where they fit in the standings.

Then, if you could maybe attach a playoff spot or two to the results of this tournament, it would breed a whole new round of storylines like a mid-major college team making a miracle run in its conference tournament. Take a team like Memphis, which has started 0-6 amidst injuries and the suspension of point guard Ja Morant. Right now, they have way bigger problems to deal with than an in-season tournament. But if you gave them an opportunity to erase all their issues with a couple good weeks of basketball? That would be interesting. 

The second big problem is that I found myself Friday night looking to see when the next in-season tournament games would be played and was a bit dismayed to see that it’s not until next Friday and then the following Tuesday, which seems random until you remember that all the NBA’s doing here is trying to avoid competition with the NFL and major college football.

So is this a Really Big Deal that we all need to pay attention to, or is it just filler programming on random nights where not much else is going on in sports? And while the flipping back-and-forth between regular season and in-season tournament may work fine for Manchester United because the Premier League and the UEFA Champions League are truly separate events with decades of tradition backing each of them, nobody would say Golden State’s 141-139 tournament win at Oklahoma City is any more important than the regular game they’ll play Wednesday in Denver against the defending champions.

Ultimately, it’s harmless. If success for the NBA was delivering a slate of close, relatively intense games, they got it. Only one of the seven matchups was decided by more than 10 points, one went to overtime and two others came down to last-second shots (including Steph Curry making a scoop layup in the final second to win).

So, great, let’s capitalize on that drama by … waiting 10 days for the Warriors to play another in-season tournament game with five regular-season games in between? Our attention spans really aren’t that long. A more compact schedule, or just dedicating an entire three-week block of the schedule to the tournament would do more to set it apart and elevate it as something different than the regular season.

There will be a lot of reflexive hate for this thing just based on it being different or non-traditional. But if we’re being honest, the NBA regular season is not so sacred that it can’t be messed with or improved. In an environment where the NBA feels it needs to do more to hold people’s attention over a long winter, there’s nothing wrong with new ideas and experiments.

But at least through one night, the in-season tournament is going to need to deliver more than a colorful shock to the senses for it to take hold in America’s sporting consciousness.